Smartphone app aims to keep smokers busy

A new app developed at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Kingston University in the United Kingdom uses games and rewards to incentivize players to kick their smoking habit.

"The good thing about a smartphone gaming app is that you can play it anywhere,” said Hope Caton, a games creation processes lecturer from Kingston University. “Craving is a short-term thing, so if you get a craving at 11 a.m., you can play the game until it passes, rather than going out for a cigarette. You've also got something to do with your hands other than smoke."

The app, Cigbreak Free, uses 37 behavioral change techniques within the smartphone game to help users quit smoking. The game side of the app has players swiping virtual cigarettes to break them within a certain time limit. Players can then advance through levels and are given rewards—ways of giving players positive feedback for choosing the game over smoking.

The app also includes a “quit journal” where users can document the amount of savings they have accumulated using the app rather than buying cigarettes. This technological approach to quitting has already been commissioned by five London boroughs as a part of public health services for those who want to quit smoking.

"I was keen to exploit the current trend in gaming to see it could be put to good use and improve people's health,” said professor Robert Walton from QMUL's Blizard Institute. "Based on our previous research, we selected and embedded health messages and behavior change techniques within the game, to help promote smoking cessation. Some of these include showing the player the health consequences of a behavior, gaining points for grabbing healthy items, or providing virtual financial incentives. But some of these techniques are so subtly embedded in the game, you wouldn't even know they're there. We're essentially trying to 'gamify' health messages and behavior change techniques as a way of embedding them in a person's mind, in the hope that they will then be able to quit smoking."

Next, the developers hope to conduct a three-month research study to measure the app's effectiveness.